a million monkeys typing

Eclipse IDE released for OpenLaszlo

Posted November 20th, 2004 at 12:59pm

Oh! I wish I had some spare time to play around with this, an Eclipse IDE for OpenLaszlo.

For those of you who haven’t tripped across it yet, OpenLaszlo is an Open Source (though once proprietary) system for creating applications that run through Macromedia Flash, thus providing a rich –but not overly complex– framework for implementing and deploying applications that run within 97% of browsers.

I love IBM’s Eclipse editor, I really do, although on slower computers it tends to be a helluva resource hog: it’s a huge Java app, after all. It’s capable of doing quite a number of things (I’ve used it for Java, HTML, text, LaTeX and Python), and it’s easily extensible. Now that it supports OpenLaszlo, it’s a killer app for producing rich web applications.

The IDE provides a rich editing environment for the LZX mark-up language, including XML and script-based content assistance, XML syntax highlighting, and XML code formatting. The editor is supported by Palette, Properties, and Outline views. These views allow developers to Drag and Drop new LZX elements into the editor, edit attributes, and modify the LZX document structure within a tree representation.

It also supports a wide range of debugging capabilities, but unfortunately is only really supported on Linux and Windows. The Mac OS X has a few issues that need to be ironed out. More information, and the download, can be found at IBM’s Alphaworks Laszlo page.

Update: CNet has an interview with the CTO of Laszlo Systems, David Temkin, where he discusses the impetus between the Laszlo development framework and going up against Macromedia.